Document Actions

How we survived jail hell (Part 2)

For
the second six months of 2002, the interrogations ceased. But from the
beginning of 2003, interviews with MI5, the FBI, the CIA and US
military intelligence became increasingly frequent. Rasul says: 'They
kept taking us and taking us, showing us photos saying: "This guy says
you've done this, this guy says you've done that" - what they meant was
that other detainees desperate to get out were making allegations,
making stuff up that they thought would help them get out of the camp.

Last year the Americans introduced a formal system of rewards for
co-operation with interrogators, so that detainees would be given an
increasing number of so-called 'comfort items' such as books, extra
clothes and utensils in return for their testimony. (The books,
best-selling novels, usually came with pages torn out, which the censor
had deemed too subversive or exciting.)

Experts
on the psychology of interrogations and false confessions say that for
prisoners who were already depressed and isolated by more than a year
of arduous incarceration, this system seems almost calculated to
produce fantastical accounts. Professor Gisli Gudjonsson of King's
College London is perhaps the world's leading authority in this area,
and he has testified in dozens of trials and helped expose numerous
miscarriages of justice. One of the methods which his research has
shown to be particularly prone to generating unreliable testimony is
the use of deception, where an interrogator will claim he has
incontrovertible proof of a suspect's guilt when in reality this does
not exist.

Such methods, the three men say, were employed
against them time and time again. For example, Rasul says, he was told
that photographs of him and an 'al-Qaeda membership form' and his
passport had been found in a raid on an Afghan cave. 'Actually I'd left
my passport in Pakistan. Then the interrogator told me that next to my
file they'd found my brother Habib's al-Qaeda file. The interrogator
said he wasn't lying, and that next time he'd bring it with him. When
it came to the next time, he claimed he'd made a mistake.'

The
interrogators also used the good cop/bad cop routine. 'It was scary
although I knew what they were doing. I think they tried it more with
some of the Arabs and the young kids.'

Less funny were the
conditions in which interrogations were conducted, in so-called
'booths' behind the cell blocks. Throughout their interviews, the
detainees wore their three-piece suits, and were shackled to the floor.

In 2003, many more interrogators were brought in, some of them
young and inexperienced. 'You'd look at these guys in their shorts and
polo shirts and think: 'This guy's an interrogator? He's only 20 years
old,' says Rasul. 'About two months ago one guy asked me: "If I wanted
to get hold of surface-to-air missiles in Tipton, where would I go?" I
started arguing with him. Did he really think I lived in some sort of
war zone. I was scared in the interrogations but towards the end the
questions just seemed stupid.'

However, last summer the
situation of the Tipton Three suddenly took a serious turn for the
worse. The Americans had a video of a meeting in August 2000 between
Osama bin Laden and Mohamed Atta, the leader of the 9/11 hijackers.
Behind bin Laden were three men, and in May 2003 someone alleged they
were none other than Iqbal, Rasul and Ahmed.

For the previous
two weeks, Rasul had been in the relatively comfortable conditions of
Camp Four, the lower-security section of Guantanamo where prisoners are
freely allowed to associate and play football and volleyball. Suddenly
he and the others found themselves in solitary confinement in the
isolation block for three months. Finally, Rasul says, a senior
interrogator arrived from Washington and played him the video. He
protested that the men in the video looked nothing like him and his
friends, and none of them had worn beards. More to the point, in August
2000, when the video was shot, he had been working in a branch of the
electronics store Curry's, and was enrolled at the University of
Central England - a fact, he suggested, his interrogators could easily
check. Instead, he says: 'They told me I could have falsified those
records, that I could have had someone working with me at Curry's who
could have faked my job records.' I'd got to the point where I just
couldn't take any more. Do what you have to do, I told them. I'd been
sitting there for three months in isolation so I said yes, it's me. Go
ahead and put me on trial.' The other two made similar confessions.

Last
September it was MI5 which for once helped them when they arrived at
the camp with the documentary evidence which showed they could not have
been in Afghanistan at the relevant time. Rasul says: 'We could prove
our alibi. But what about other people, especially from countries where
such records may not be available?'

There is also the danger
that false testimony from one inmate, extracted by the Guantanamo
incentives system, may breed a false confession from another. Iqbal
recalls: 'One inmate said I had been in the Farouk terrorist training
camp in Afghanistan. It led to a whole series of interrogations where
they tried to persuade me that I had been. The way the system is it's
accusation after accusation; if this one won't work maybe this one
will, if that won't work try this one, until they finally get their
confession.'

For those who do confess, and fail to sustain
their alibis, trial by an American military commission and a possible
death penalty awaits. Those who have been charged are no longer at Camp
Delta, the three men reveal. They have been moved to a new,
super-maximum security facility outside the main compound - Camp Echo.
A few men have been returned thence to the main Guantanamo Camp; they
describe a white-walled, sound-absorbent hell of 24-hour solitary
confinement in cells smaller than Camp Delta's, with a guard
permanently stationed outside each cell door. Camp Echo's current
inmates, say the three men, include the Britons Feroz Abbasi and
Moazzem Begg, and the Australian David Hicks. One detail of Hicks's
life inside Guantanamo Bay reveals the desperate measures prisoners go
to retain their sanity. He occupies his mind all day by catching and
killing mice. More than a year ago, the three men said, Hicks renounced
Islam and shaved off his beard. He no longer answers the call to
prayer. 'He's just a little guy with a very deep voice,' says Rasul.
'If you met him you'd think he was the typical kind of Aussie you might
see drinking Fosters in a bar.'

Freedom

Proof
of the Tipton Three's alibis led to rapidly improving treatment. Every
Sunday after last September, Rasul says, they were taken to a shed they
called the 'love shack', and allowed to sit unchained on a sofa to
watch movies on DVD. They were allowed to read magazines, and were
sometimes fed with hamburgers from Guantanamo's branch of McDonald's.

Unaware
of the stream of leaks to the media which suggested their release might
be imminent, they began to sense that the end of their ordeal might be
drawing near. Even then, they were still being interrogated regularly.
Rasul says: 'They'd still show us pictures, try to get names. My last
interrogation was on 5 March. But I could see the guy was getting
desperate. At one point he said: "Look, I'm from the CIA, I can get you
anything. What do you want? Coke? Ice cream?" '

For men who had
been through Kunduz and Kandahar, this was not impressive. All are
convinced that there are no 'big-time' terrorists at Guantanamo:
arguably the most dangerous, in American eyes, says Ahmed, is a group
of Taliban mullahs. American intelligence sources have confirmed this
view to me. The 'big-timers' - men such as Khalid Shaikh Mohamed,
architect of 9/11, have never been near Guantanamo. One source says:
'Guantanamo may even be a bit of a front, designed to divert al-Qaeda's
attention. It takes everybody's attention away from more important
matters and locations where big fish are being held. The secrecy
surrounding it makes everybody think that very serious stuff is going
on there.'

The three say some of the inmates have seen such
suspects - not in Cuba, but at Bagram airbase in Afghanistan. According
to Iqbal, 'we spoke to people who'd been with them there when they were
being interrogated. They said they flew them out of there alive, but in
coffins.'

Reviled so publicly by Rumsfeld, now the Tipton Three
must struggle to rebuild their lives. Their home town, say their
families, has become too dangerous: effigies of men in orange jump
suits have been strung from lampposts, while the area is a strongholds
of the extreme right-wing BNP.

For now they have been
marvelling at the little things, Rasul says: sitting in cars without
chains and being able to operate the windows; finding that food does
not arrive automatically at set hours, and can be tasty and varied.
This weekend their dominant emotion is relief. As they come to reflect
on the experience over the coming weeks, it seems likely to turn to a
burning, righteous anger.